You’d have to assume that actors who land huge roles in blockbuster films wouldn’t have a single complaint, right? They (presumably) made tons of money, their faces were plastered on billboards across the country, and they might even end up on the IMDb homepage under who’s “Born Today.” Because that’s how you know you’ve made it big.
But not every actor is that nostalgic about those famous roles. You get the occasional performer who hates everything about the character that made them famous or kept them in the limelight and feels the need to tell everyone about it. They go to interviews and denounce their films, for one reason or another. Which makes sense, after all. Who hasn’t complained about their prior jobs as soon as something better comes along? Sometimes you just need a paycheck, or a gig you thought was going to be amazing derailed before your very eyes.
Most recently, Sally Field stepped forward as one of those actors who regretted a role, namely Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man. She told Howard Stern that she didn’t care for the movies and that she found her role pretty two-dimensional. The only reason she agreed to it in the first place was as a favor to the film’s producer.
George Clooney and Shia LaBeouf have also thrown shade at their films Batman And Robin and Transformers 2, respectively. Clooney went so far as to say he thought he ruined the franchise, and LaBeouf stressed that the mess of a production had too much money behind it with not enough inspiration. Bill Murray complained about his Garfield pictures, claiming he had to “fix” the script that he originally thought came from a Coen Brother, not Joel Cohen. Famously, Twilight star Robert Pattinson has raked the franchise over the coals in plenty of interviews.
Of course, you also get the much subtler jabs at big roles from actors. Both of the leads in Fifty Shades Of Grey had such a terrible time during production that they had seemingly zero will to care about the series, and its sequels are being shot back-to-back just to get them out of the way.
It just goes to show that actors denouncing huge roles is really a testament to their abilities as performers: Not only are they pretending to be fictional characters, but they’re pretending to give a crap about pretending to do it.
